Keltham heard an estimate on 100gp for a fourth-circle wizard's per-seven-days earning potential; from there to 500gp for fifth-circle wizards seems like quite a jump.

Why he jumps on that part... well, it's a true-in-Taldor fact so perfectly safe so far as Maillol knows.

"5th-circle is when you become able to Teleport, which is massively more in demand than most things someone can do at 4th-circle.  Also, I'm guessing it was Sevar who told you the figure of 100gp/week for her own earnings; she's right, but most 4th-circle wizards wouldn't make that.  Not every 5th-circle wizard is qualified to be Security either."

Right then.

Does it happen to be true at all, that Cheliax has a concept of the standard cost of a high-potential young researcher exceptionally good at math?

Nope.

Also right then.  Keltham is thinking of retaining eight out of the current twelve job candidates past their first contracted week.  He'll need to talk options for the remaining four compatible with Governance security considerations, and make sure those options are good enough.

Keltham is pretty sure that Asmodia, Meritxell, and Ione all now have expected value to Chelish Governance exceeding that of a 5th-circle Security wizard, but for purposes of aligning incentives, Keltham intends to offer them most of their real compensation in the form of small shares of future Project Lawful income, which is considered the very standard best practice of Civilization.  His plan is 200gp/week for the three, plus a 10,000gp bonus for Ione in respect for her special, hazardous, possibly long-term damaging, and highly useful service in delivering advance warning on the Nidal assault and maybe actually timing that assault so Keltham would be safer.  Carissa gets 300gp/week in respect of her status as being something like Keltham's de facto ops officer or second-in-command.

Pilar, Peranza, Tonia, and Gregoria aren't obviously going to end up irreplaceably valuable, but are still in the running for being less brilliant researchers, or maybe brilliant ones if the intelligence headbands ever come through and are any good.  100gp/week for each of them except Pilar.  Pilar gets 150gp/week in token of her higher-than-obvious expected value and a future promotion if it turns out that Cayden Cailean has more in mind than snacks, and Pilar should also get 1000gp for taking a sword in place of Keltham, which would not obviously have been a terrible thing if it had happened, but key word 'obviously'.

Keltham realizes that no actual agreement has been reached on how Chelish funding of the Project will be compensated.  Keltham will compose a suggested interim compact on what counts as Project revenue, pending some more difficult working-out of the basic question of how to measure the Project's benefit to Cheliax (including the counterfactual on Keltham having started elsewhere instead), and fire that back as a suggestion.  But people do need their nonvolatile portion of their salaries in the meanwhile; possibly they wouldn't starve if unpaid, but it is considered a core good practice in Civilization that if you can't pay basic salaries it's time to shut down the company.

Keltham's current plan is to request 500gp/week nominal salary for now, but with the understanding that Keltham might come back and ask for an increase if it turns out that there are magic items he can't get on a Governance budget and that would substantially increase his own effectiveness.  If it's a better look if Keltham gets 100gp/week instead, he's potentially open to that for now or to start, since he doesn't currently know how he'd actually spend the money on much.

No other project members have particularly expressed agreement with any of these offers, and the four core members, in Keltham's view, would have considerable leverage over him to demand higher nonvolatile incomes, though Keltham would in that case reduce their share of future Project income.  Keltham is nonetheless interested in hearing if these budget quantities sound feasible.

She wishes she weren't lying to him.

It's a stupid thing to wish; if he were actually just Evil this project would be going much better but much worse for Carissa in particular. 

But it'd be nice, to be standing here in Maillol's room on the same side. 

Also, that's a lot of money! She'll be able to make so many magic items with which to corrupt and ensnare Keltham which she can credibly claim is within the budget he negotiated for her.

Sevar, orders?  It's within our actual budget capacity but maybe you want him less capable or the researchers hungrier or just to not have it look like he gets everything without negotiating.

She thinks they should go ahead. The researchers now know that they were forced to sell their souls for much less than they're selling for in Dis; a lot of gold is the right start towards convincing them they're still coming out ahead. And Keltham's more sensitive to being cheated about money than to being cheated in other ways. Probably it should be a strain for alter Cheliax, though, so future requests can be denied.

She does not want Sala to have that much money to play with. Perhaps such a large sum can't be gotten all at once.

They can discuss the other girls later.

"I'll look into available options for the four leaving the Project, and get back to you shortly."

"10,000gp to Ione would be politically difficult to swing, for now.  Yes, she saved us more than two Raise Deads, it's still politically difficult.  Easier to give her a higher salary for the moment."

"For the rest, it'll burn some political capital and reduce our future room for maneuver, but I can make it happen.  You okay with that?"

"I'll ask Ione if she's okay with being at 400gp/week to reflect her special services, though with the understanding that she's still below Carissa on the organizational chart."

"I don't suppose that there'd possibly be any legible answer, if I asked for a quantitative estimate of how much political capital it burns, as a fraction of all we've got?  Or how fast I can regenerate that political capital by teaching more useful things similar to those already taught?  Or how much better it is if the salaries all go down by 25%?"

"Sorry.  Best I can give you is that knocking 25% off all the salaries would probably not really help much."

"Not saying it's the wrong decision, I think it's the right decision if you want my opinion on it, just letting you know the costs.  And that a similar recurring expense getting added next week, wouldn't be a good look absent something exciting to show along the way."

"Well, let's do it then.  And to return to a previous question, your own boss and the line of reporting from there?"

"In principle, my current boss is High Priestess Jacint Subirachs, who is not usually a manager and is more of a 7th-circle cleric with a peacetime specialty in... actually, you just ask her if you want to know what she usually does.  Subirachs can be the 7th-circle firepower on the premises, but without her belonging to the military or any of the other factions that would love to absorb us even though they scarcely have any idea what we do; meaning that none of those factions were offended by another faction getting the prize when it was announced I would temporarily be reporting to her after the Nidal attack.  Subirachs reports directly to the Grand High Priestess.  She is not, in fact, managing anyone or anything besides me, except as directed in cases like her monitoring Sevar for the last few days."

"Project Lawful is in principle a Church-managed project because of the Asmodeus intervention, hence the ultimate report to the Grand High Priestess on paper.  Its budget however is coming out of the Queen's side of things, and if the Queen gave me or Subirachs an order we'd obey.  The Queen could in principle fund it from her privy purse but she'd rather not and I'd rather not ask.  So your budget request for salaries is going to be submitted to a special projects office general enough that it could reasonably claim the credit - inside Governance internal politics, not with the Queen who knows better - for cheaper roads or hotter forges or several of the other things you've talked about, whose director knows me personally and who the Queen had a personal chat with and which will then be backed for a correspondingly higher budget within Governance."

"Anything relating to Security ignores all this and heads off into a bizarre tangle which, from your perspective, acts like a spun coin that is also insane.  I do expect them to do a good job of not letting you get kidnapped."

"On the whole, this is a stunningly clear situation for a project like this one to end up in, and you should thank me for maneuvering to keep things so incredibly simple and straightforward.  I hope we can keep it."

"Thank you for your valuable work in keeping this situation so amazingly clear and straightforward.  I was, in fact, able to understand all that, and that's better than I expected walking in."

"Low expectations are the key here.  Keep 'em low and you'll stay happy."

"Civilization has a similar proverb.  It is however about accurate expectations.  Our version of the proverb is objectively better and I'm not going to make like it's not."

Was that a threat?  It doesn't seem like that should be a threat?  If it's not a threat Maillol does not quite know what it is.

"Sorry for asking, but, I don't suppose we're done here?  For now."

"Done for now.  I'll go back and talk to my researchers and send you a message when requested salaries finalize."

Carissa leaves with him. She looks as disconcerted as alter-Carissa would be. "The Worldwound isn't run like that! There's a very clear command structure!"

"I'm mostly guessing that reflects a decision to allocate more competent people to the Worldwound, thereby leaving fewer to run the rest of Cheliax, and not that people actually become more competent managers when fighting demons.  But it's an important question because it determines whether the rest of Cheliax would get saner or crazier if we closed the Worldwound."

"Somebody should talk to me about whether hitting that place really hard, the way Civilization could hit it, would actually help or hurt anything.  Since I last thought of that question, the new thought occurs to me that since there's apparently known Wish phrasings that definitely do create giant flaming craters, that it hasn't been considered to set one of those on a timer and get everyone away?  Should I actually be talking to Ione about that sort of thing?"

"Wouldn't solve the problem at all. Or, it'd kill the demons that are currently there, but as long as the rift is open, more will come through, and we don't know how to close it."

"Guess it's the sort of thing that I probably can't solve easily, but I should talk about it with a more experienced wizard anyways.  Just in case I'm like 'well have you tried observing the rift's resonating frequency so you can try driving it to collapse using a simple oscillator' and they're like 'what'."

"It seems worth a shot, and I actually do expect Civilization will close the Worldwound, just by - being able to have lots of smart people think about it full time and being richer so we can move the wardstones in a bit at a time, give ourselves a smaller perimeter to defend, figuring out other clever stuff. But my bet is there's not a single clever solution. Partially because Iomedae is notably absent from this here god pileup."

"You act like we know we have the complete god list."

"I don't quite see that reasoning squaring up, actually.  Unless Iomedae has an impossibly high discount rate for a god, she should care similarly regardless of whether we close the Worldwound in fifty years or five, unless it's otherwise due to close anyways.  I'd guess that, if she doesn't like Asmodeus, she's not happy enough to help with this project even if it ends up closing the Worldwound later..."

"I'd be more nervous about the conspicuous apparent absence of Lawful Good if Cayden Cailean wasn't in.  Not that I understand what that implies, but, it's less of an unambiguous warning sign than all the altruists staying out of your project."

Snort. "Agreed. But as it stands we've got - your god, Nethys, Cayden Cailean, Asmodeus - pretty much the whole god-spectrum."